B. J. Fogg and His Disciples
In 2006 a young Stanford student named Mike Krieger took a class with Professor B. J. Fogg on persuasive technology. Fogg had his students build applications as a class project, and Krieger designed one that would encourage people to send happy photos to their friends living in places where the weather was bad, using a phone. (This was prior to the mass use of smartphones for sharing photos.) Krieger called the application “Send the Sunshine,” and the idea of sharing photos stuck with him.1 He later went on to found, with Kevin Systrom, a photo-sharing social network, Instagram. Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012. At the time, Instagram hadn’t earned a dime in revenue. What Instagram had, as Krieger had learned from his time with Fogg, was the ability to entice and addict its users, some of whom spent hours a day scrolling through the images posted by others, and further hours planning the images they wanted to capture and post.
Krieger is Fogg’s most prominent alumnus, but many others learned from him how to build habits in users, including those who took his now famous course focused on Facebook apps in 2007.2 (Students in that course built Facebook apps that pulled in millions of users and generated tens or hundreds of millions of interactions—and they were not professional software designers.)
Another Fogg alumnus, Nir Eyal, wrote possibly the seminal book for designers of modern technology products, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. It’s required reading at many prominent start-up incubators and accelerators, has more than a thousand reviews on Amazon, and is a perennial bestseller.3 Eyal founded two start-ups in the early 2000s before going on to become an investor, consultant, and paid speaker. He is unabashed about his goal of helping companies create products that induce “sticky” behaviors and draw the attention of consumers; each year Eyal hosts a Habit Summit in which he shares his latest insights on how to hook consumers (and, more recently, on the ethics of hooking consumers on software applications).4 His book is a concise and practical application guide to much of Fogg’s research in an area that academics call “behavioral design.”
Other Fogg alumni have gone on to found companies, and many occupy influential product-design and product-development roles at companies large and small in Silicon Valley. It is not an overstatement to say that Fogg has godlike status in technology circles.
Beyond Silicon Valley and technology-product-design circles, Fogg holds far less business renown: although respected in academic circles, he has published no bestselling books and does not go on the broad lecture circuit. He was far less focused on building addictive behaviors than, say, the makers of actual slot machines, whose efforts pre-date the development of the app economy. But Fogg has had a disproportionate influence on Silicon Valley founders and on the ongoing quest of so many technology companies to design products that exploit the hardwired weaknesses of our slowly evolving brains.
Fogg’s work is an intellectual continuation of the research pioneered by B. F. Skinner in the 1930s at Harvard University. Skinner’s box riveted the world of psychology, but, curiously, behaviorism did not immediately catch fire. It was B. J. Fogg, in the mid 1990s, who showed its power. As a PhD student at Stanford, Fogg had been intrigued by the idea of using computers—then still an emerging technology—to shape and reward behaviors. His curiosity was driven by a simple observation: technologies, in particular interactive technologies such as phones, computers, and tablets, were becoming more common and occupying a greater part of our lives. Fogg devised experiments to test that thesis and found that technology was even more powerful than he had thought. Technology-mediated cues proved extremely influential upon human behavior and were far more malleable than levers and Skinner’s physical cues had been. It turned out that “mental food pellets” were at least as potent.
Fogg made the logical leap and envisioned how technology could be used as a tool for good: to help busy people better manage their finances, learn new skills more quickly and easily, and adopt healthier behaviors. In a 1997 paper on his findings, Fogg wrote presciently, “Exactly when and where such persuasion is beneficial and ethical should be the topic of further research and debate.”5 As he continued his research, Fogg advocated the establishment of a new field of study that wove computer science and psychology together. He thought it should be called “captology” (from “computers as persuasive technologies”).6
According to Fogg, you need three things to happen in order to influence a behavior. A person must want to perform an action or do something, must have the ability to do so, and must receive a trigger or a prompt. Without motivation, a trigger is useless and just serves as an annoyance to the person. If the desired action is too difficult or complicated, that desire serves only to frustrate and discourage the person. The triad seems incredibly obvious, as great explications often do.
Probably Fogg’s most important contribution, however, was the insight that in order to change behavior, reducing the scope and complexity of the task is more effective than increasing the motivation. (Think of the endless video spool on Netflix and Facebook. The goal is to get people to watch more videos. To that end, product designers remove all friction—making it harder for users to stop watching the video than to continue watching it.) This is particularly effective when our brains emit the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine in response to stimuli such as receiving likes, checking e-mails and finding that one has arrived, or being pinged in an online chat. So facilitating access coupled with pleasure inducement is a powerful combination for creating habits of consumption.
The field would come to be called “behavioral design,” and Fogg has remained its intellectual leader. It has dovetailed with a burgeoning interest in behavioral economics and decision science led by scholars such as Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Dan Ariely, and the 2017 Nobel prizewinner in economics, Richard Thaler. The research of these and others has illuminated the previously undocumented “wetware biases” (cognitive biases) and flaws that help explain some of what makes humans so susceptible to technology-driven behavioral design even if it results in outcomes that make them unhappier.
Some of Fogg’s research findings may seem head-smackingly obvious. Importantly, Fogg is not a clear villain in this story. Much of his early and continuing research explores not only core behavioral-design techniques but also how to use mobile technology to improve health outcomes and change bad habits. In recent interviews, Fogg has expressed misgivings that his findings are being used for profiteering and hoarding human attention in ways that are not good for people or society. But as with many other researchers (Einstein prominent among them), his work was easily enough incorporated into uses that far outstripped his initial ideas.
Fogg is hardly alone with his qualms. Even Eyal has expressed concern that technology consumption is out of control, that habits driven by the very insights he helped to popularize are coming back to haunt us. Joining Jobs and Gates, Eyal puts strict limits on how his children consume technology, for example. In this he joins the growing ranks of technology leaders expressing concern that we have not sufficiently examined the long-term human impacts of modern technology. Under the microscope, as you’ll see in the next few chapters, things do not look very good.